Turning a Vicious Cycle Into a Virtuous One

Turning a Vicious Cycle into a Virtuous One

By Louis Pavia, ENACCT

Part 3. Common accrual problems and ideas for solutions

Parts 1 and 2 described the rationale and the opportunity for sites to improve their cancer clinical trial accrual by conducting a critical self-assessment and the metrics that can be used to assess that performance. Part 3 focuses on the types of problems that may be identified in each of the 7 critical dimensions and strategies to resolve them.

Vision, Strategy and Culture

Three types of challenges often occur in this dimension:

The vision is not clear or understood
The cancer care strategy and the vision are not linked
The vision or strategy is not reinforced in the day to day activities of the clinicians and staff

Problems could be illuminated when, for example, the primary purpose of the research program is to offer treatment options to patients with cancers that have high incidence rates in the community yet the trials available do not match that objective. Or the strategy is to serve more patients with a specific cancer and trials for that cancer are not offered. Or the staff does not share the vision or receive any feedback on the performance of the specific trials or the research program. These challenges can often be addressed by explicitly delineating the vision for cancer research and communicating that directly with clinicians and staff or working with them to define a vision that everyone can buy into. The vision and strategy should also be reflected in the criteria used to select trials and performance evaluations of the team.

Trial Selection and Initiation

The key shortcomings we find in this dimension include an imbalance between the trials open for enrollment and the new cancer patients seen; a lack of templates/standards, appropriate timelines and deadlines for selecting and operationalizing a trial; inappropriate criteria and a failure to include the right people for selecting a trial and failure to utilize a feedback loop to improve the selection process.

An examination of the number of cases for a specific cancer per trial available for that cancer could reveal too few patients to reasonably expect to achieve accrual goals or too few trials to maximize accrual potential. A failure to define timelines and enforce deadlines for key points in the process (e.g. IRB approval, budget and contract negotiations, opening a trial for enrollment and enrolling the first patient) could render what initially was an innovative and unique intervention into one that is no longer relevant and unlikey to accrue patients. Examining the characteristics of trials that meet accrual projection on time and those that do not and refining the selection criteria as appropriate can reverse a pattern of poor trial selections and improve accrual results.

Accrual Processes and Procedures

Accrual is a complex process and there are frequent opportunities for bottlenecks and leaks. These might include but are not limited to:

Policies and procedures that are not well defined, documented and routinely updated
Not consistently pre-screening all newly diagnosed patients
Failure to screen and offer patients the opportunity to participate
Not tracking the numbers of patients pre-screened, screened and offered participation and the reasons for declining to consider the clinical trial option.
Not measuring and reporting accrual performance to clinicians and staff

Many sites rely on multiple methods to identify patients with possible trial options without specific criteria being consistently applied to all patients, and accountability for doing so. Inevitably, this leads to missed opportunities to find potential trial participants. Tracking which patients with a potential trial match are actually offered an opportunity to participate and the reasons they decline provides unbiased information to identify problems and make improvements. This information can also be used to motivate physicians and staff to improve their own accrual performance.

Communications Practices

When communications among research team members or between the research team and patients is ineffective, opportunities are lost. For example, if patients do not receive information about clinical trials in time to fully consider them as a treatment option or in a form that is understandable to them they are less likely to be able to make an informed decision. Consent materials must reflect the preferences or requirements of the patients served. The role of the treating oncologist and other staff members in the consent process must be clear and transitions well defined. The research team often is not sufficiently engaged in the trial selection process, sufficiently informed of the availability of new trials, or reminded of the availability of existing trails, to facilitate accrual. The expectations for accrual and the actual performance must be communicated to the entire research team.

People and Tools

High employee turnover and a lack of training lead to inconsistent performance. Sites cannot rely exclusively on on-the-job training. The specific activities and competencies required of each team member should be delineated and best practices communicated. This should include the availability and use of tools such as practice management systems and electronic medical records. Any gaps in proficiency should be identified and training made available to improve performance. There should also be clear accountability and responsibility for accrual.

Finance and Management

There are several tools and techniques beyond the budget to manage the operational performance of the research efforts. Ideally, a real time dashboard of key metrics should be available. Short of that, certain analyses should be performed on at least an annual basis. These might include the mean, median and range of certain timelines for various types of trials such as:

IRB approval
Budget and Contract Negotiations
Trial initiation
First patient enrolled

It might also include certain enrollment measures, such as number of patients by trial type, cancer type and oncologist. Financial indicators such as budgeted and actual cost per enrollee and breakeven enrollment can be tracked. Trial availability indicators such as cancer specific newly diagnosed patients per trial and performance measures such as number of patients per trial by trial age, proportion of newly diagnosed patients enrolled in trials and enrollment per staff member should be calculated. Process measures such as percent of patients prescreened, screened and offered a clinical trial as well as reasons not offered or declined should also be assessed. Each of these indicators can provide valuable information to identify problems and improve performance.

Community Outreach

Accrual can be improved by eliminating misperceptions about clinical trials in the community and among referring physicians. This requires leveraging community resources such as community organizations and community leaders. This can be done by providing useful information to existing organizations and training your own “ambassadors” to spread the word. It could also mean training clinical trial alumni to both spread the word and support patients in their decision process.

Clinical research requires a significant investment by community providers and can provide substantial returns in both quality of care and strategic value. In order to fulfill the promise of cancer research to patients, providers and researchers, leaders must actively manage the operating as well as the clinical performance of clinical trials. Too often sites are so focused on just making ends meet with their cancer research program that they fail to capitalize on the opportunity to make dramatic improvement in their performance. ENACCT has designed this assessment as part of its mission to improve access to cancer clinical trials and has developed a set of tools to facilitate this process available on our website ENACCT.org.